The text on this page is excerpted - with permission - from Peggy Milliron's blog.
View the blog for more information and periodic updates.

Salvatore Rizzo

Like most of the Italians who arrived in Buffalo between 1880 and 1920,
Rizzo's background was agricultural. He found work as a fruit peddler,
which again was a common occupation for new Italian immigrants.

But there was something that set Salvatore Rizzo apart: he came from
eight generations of pupari back in Palermo. Pupari is the plural form
of puparo - 'puppet master' in Italian. His father had begun teaching
him the skill and the art of the marionette performance as a boy, and
he had worked in his father's 'teatrino', as his father worked with his
grandfather before him. It was a family tradition, as Salvatore's son
Frank proudly told a Buffalo Times
reporter in 1932. "My father can trace his ancestry eight generations
and find that they were all great masters in marionettes. It was the
great show in Italy."

The Theater on Dante Place

(online August 2013)

In this post I'd like to share
what I have learned so far about Salvatore Rizzo's theater on Dante
Place. For the sake of coherence, I'm going to refer to the street as
Dante Place, even though it was named Canal Street at an earlier point
in time.

... every seat in the little theater is filled nightly, and all the
wall space taken too. There is the clash of swords and shields, and
shouts of "brava" from the all-male crowd, as the marionettes act
out the stories of Charlemagne and his courageous knights.

I like the part from the article above where the writer tells how Rizzo
let him look behind stage, where rows and rows of marionettes "are hung
aloft like so many Bluebeard victims." Salvatore Rizzo had over 75
marionettes, which gives one an idea of how intricate were the stories
he told with them.

Buffalo's Little Italy

The Italian born population in Buffalo increased from 6,000 to 16,000
between 1900 and 1920. Italians represented 10% of Buffalo's foreign
born population. They tended to settle near others from their village
or town, thus there were four or five areas in Buffalo with heavily
Italian populations. This blog is concerned with the Italians who
settled in the waterfront area near Canal Street (later named Dante
Place). Many of them were from the region around Palermo in Sicily.
When people write of Buffalo's Little Italy, this is the area they are
usually referring to.

St. Anthony of Padua Church played a large role in family and social
life. It was the only Catholic church in the neighborhood until Our
Lady of Mount Carmel Church was built in 1906. That church no longer
exists; it was razed in the name of urban development in 1949. St.
Anthony's is still here - it stands at 160 Court Street in downtown
Buffalo. Social clubs met at the church, along with labor unions
when they came to exist. It was the place to celebrate births and
marriages, and where funerals were held. There were parades and
festivities to celebrate saint's days.

Education was important to the newly arrived immigrants. I have read
that it was the ambition of every family to have a doctor, a lawyer,
and a priest. The public school in the neighborhood was School #2.

Pupi Fratelli Napoli

Rizzo would have had his sons helping, and would have spoken all of the
lines himself. I have not been able to find out whether he had music or
not, but I did find an article from the newspaper that described the
excitement at Rizzo's performances that was created during battle
scenes. Rizzo would stamp his feet on the hollow boards behind the
stage during the clash, the same as these Napoli brothers do. The
audience would shout for their hero, and there would be the sound of
clanging shields and swords. All of Rizzo's shows were in Italian as
tradition dictated.

Immigration and Italian Culture in Buffalo

In 1900, these were the cities with the largest number of Italian
immigrants, in order: New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston,
Newark, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Jersey City, Buffalo.

Between 1900 and 1920, Buffalo's population of Italian born citizens
rose from 6,000 to 16,000. Buffalo was and is very much a city of
immigrants - in 1920 Italians accounted for 10% of Buffalo's foreign
born population, and 7% of her population overall.